Abstract: By making use of the survey data from 393 insured farmers in Anhui province, this paper constructs the two-classified and the multi-classified orderly Logistic models respectively to analyze the causes of the lowest payment level dilemma in the New Rural Endowment Insurance System(NREIS) on the basis of the “knowledge gap” hypothesis, so as to study the reason why the low-income famers choose the lower payment. The empirical results show that although the amount of payment may not be an economic burden for farmers, there is a “knowledge gap” effect among the farmers in their access to policy information of the NREIS, making the lower-income farmers stay in disadvantage to information acquisition. Thus the lower-income farmers have lower cognition towards the policy of the NREIS, leading them to choose the lowest payment level. Therefore, the publicity of NREIS should be strengthened, particularly, attention should be paid to give the lower-income lower-literacy farmers detailed explanation.

Key words: New Rural Endowment Insurance System; knowledge gap effect; multi-classified orderly Logistic Model